


The Tower Reversed

by Sour_Idealist



Category: Dragon Age - All Media Types, Dragon Age: Inquisition
Genre: Angry Sex, F/M, Future Fic, Lavellan is no longer remotely impressed, Mildly Dubious Consent, Post Highly-Speculative DA4, Post-Trespasser, Solas Loses
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-12-14
Updated: 2017-12-14
Packaged: 2019-02-09 18:42:06
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,022
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12894360
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Sour_Idealist/pseuds/Sour_Idealist
Summary: Inquisitor Lavellan comes to speak with Skyhold's first master and last prisoner.





	The Tower Reversed

**Author's Note:**

> Implicit suicidal leanings. Also, all sexual contact in this fic is intended as consensual, but Solas is still Lavellan's prisoner at the time, so it's not exactly good consent practices.

The dungeons under Skyhold smelled of old blood and wet stone.

The cells had been emptied years ago, all the old prisoners remanded to their differing authorities, but the last cell along the row had a new occupant. He sat slumped on the floor, his hands chained above his head; blood lay crusted in streaks on his bare scalp and on his hands. He still wore – he had been left – the jawbone of a wolf around his neck.

Footsteps echoed on the stairs. Solas twitched, fingers clenching against the wall; he kept his head fixedly down until the door came clattering open. The torchlight fell across his face. He had been weeping.

“Inquisitor,” he rasped, staring up at her. She wore dark red; her tunic had been tailored for the stump of her left arm.

“Is that all you have to say to me, Solas?” she asked. He closed his eyes. “Look at me, damn you.”

“Vhenan,” he said. His eyes stayed closed. She took a step closer, than another, her boots loud against the stone; he looked at her at last, and caught his breath in quiet pain. “Oh, ma vhenan. Ir abelas –” His voice broke. She didn’t move, only stared down.

“I’ve thought...” she began at last. She stopped, and licked her lips. “I thought so many times about what I might have to say to you. When we met again.” He shivered in his chains, making them rattle. “I can’t remember any of them now.” She sighed. “It happened last time, too. I blamed it on the Qunari then.”

He stared at the toes of her boots.

“There’s something I can’t work out,” she said. “When we were chasing you through the Crossroads from Tevinter. I heard you make it into the final sanctum. We were still so far away – I thought, _we can’t possibly make it in time._ ”

“But you kept running,” he whispered.

“Of course I did," she said, as if it were obvious. "And then I got through the door –” She had flung herself through the Eluvian, clutching her staff awkward and one-handed, Cassandra and Leliana at her back, and found Solas standing over the altar with his new focus cupped inert between his hands. Her lightning caught him right between the eyes, and he fumbled the orb and then let it fall to draw his staff.

“You had time,” she said. “To start the ritual. We weren’t sure we could stop you once you began. I was afraid the backlash would kill us all, or shatter the Eluvians, or tear the Fade open again.” She laughed hollowly. “All these years later, I still had to stop myself from looking to you while we argued, to ask you about it or just to talk it over.”

“I… could not have answered,” he said. “I did not know either.” Slowly, as if she dragged the words out of him, he admitted, “It might have been… difficult to affect the spell, once it had begun. Not impossible. You could have done it, if anyone could.”

“More difficult than dragging you home?” she asked.

“Most likely, yes.” He tried to smile; it sat uneasy on his lips. “Though I flatter myself I put up a fight.”

“You did,” she said. “But you didn’t start the ritual.” He flinched. Mercilessly she continued: “You hesitated at the end. Didn’t you?”

“I…”

“Answer me, Solas. You’ve lied to me enough. Tell me the truth.”

Face crumpling, he whispered, “Yes.” 

“Why?”

He looked away; she dropped to her knees and slapped him sharp across the face. The crack echoed. “Look at me, Solas! Tell me why.”

His head lolled back against the stone; she grabbed his chin and pulled his gaze to hers. He cringed.

“Because of you,” he rasped, still not quite meeting her eyes.

She backhanded the other cheek. “ _Fuck_ you,” she snarled, grabbing his face again. “Would you have done it still if you could have brought me with you? Let the whole world burn and expected me to kiss you in the ashes?” He gasped, blinking back tears. “ _Answer my questions!_ You always liked doing it before.”

“No,” he breathed.

“ _No?_ Damn you, Solas, I thought you –”

“ _No,”_ he broke back in. “No. I –” His voice cracked; he whispered, “No.”

“No, _what,”_ she hissed between her teeth.

He dropped his gaze to the floor; she let him do it, her fingers still digging into his jaw. “I did not think of you alone,” he whispered. “Before the altar I recalled the Seeker crowning you in faith.” He tilted his head towards the door, towards the place a hundred yards away where Lavellan had been named Inquisitor. “I had feared for what you might become, and yet you were so beautiful claiming what was once my home. I thought of what you made of Cole, which I had never thought could be. I thought of Varric at your side, of all the dreams that he has written. How the Wardens fought under your hand, in spite of all their order’s sins. Cassandra’s strength of will and how she yet confessed she judged you wrong. Briala took her lover back under your hand – you led the Bull to freedom – I recalled the people of the Crossroads and how their faces lit when you came by – all you said to me after you drank of Mythal’s Well – all the people you drew here –” His next inhale was almost a sob. “The world is a sick and ugly place, and I caused so many of its ills. And yet it made you who you are, and you loved the world so well. It is more lovely than I dreamed a world sundered like this could be. How could I throw it all aside?”

Lavellan stared at him, eyes wide in the flickering dark. Her fingernails dug into his cheek; fresh blood seeped down her fingers and Solas’s face as she leaned in and kissed his mouth.

He gasped against her lips, his wrists twisting against the wall as he tried to reach for her. She bit him hard. Her eyes were closed. Her lashes lay damp against her cheek.

“You _bastard,_ ” she whispered. “You stupid, arrogant fool.”

“I know,” he whispered. “I know. Oh, vhenan, I wanted so badly for you to stop me.”

“You could have stopped yourself.” Her voice was hoarse. She kissed him again, inelegant; her fingers traced the side of his throat, the scar where Harding’s wild-thrown knife had caught him half a year ago. A tear spattered against her knuckles. She braced her hand against the wall, fingers sliding on the stone, and moved to straddle him. “You had to know it wasn’t right. All that time we fought Corypheus, you could have come to me, told us – anything. Everything.” She pressed her forehead against his. “I know it wouldn’t have been easy. But you didn’t have to lie to me.”

“I know, my love. You’re right.” He tilted his lips up to hers, a helpless supplication. “I thought of it a thousand times. In the Fade, I nearly told you, and when I brought you to the waterfall – so many nights I almost walked into your dreams and laid the truth of my past at your feet – I did not dare. I did not dare.”

“Any time these last five years,” Lavellan breathed into his mouth, remorseless. Her hand twisted in the front of his ragged shirt, pulling him up to her. “You could have surrendered to any of us. None of my people would shoot you under truce. You could have just _stopped fighting,_ Solas, any time you wanted. You could have vanished into uthenera again, and let us all run ourselves in circles until we found the Eluvians empty – you could have done anything in the world except for what you did. You _coward._ ”

“Every one of the elvhen dead that there has ever been is on my hands,” he whispered. “We were _immortal._ Even the lowliest slave could one day dream of something better – Arlathan was not unchanging – and now we are born and bleed and die in misery and squalor, never knowing what we might have been –”

She drew back, lip curling. “An eternity of slavery without the mercy of death? How dare you call that better? You traded one flawed ugly world for another, and you didn’t think about whether you were sure destroying it was better, and your solution was to _do it again!_ ”

Solas stared, struck dumb at last.

“You tried this,” Lavellan repeated. “It didn’t go too well. Why did you think this time would be different?”

“I thought – if I could only undo…” His voice wavered, barely audible at all.

“You destroyed a world and made another, and you found the new one ugly so you thought you’d try the same again,” Lavellan repeated. “In a few ages would we find you trying to throw the Veil back up and bring us back?”

He bowed his head in slow surrender. She stared at him another moment and then crushed him against the wall, kissing him deep. Her fingers found the lacings of his trousers.

“I wish I’d never loved you,” she whispered, reaching in. Grief had kept him soft; he came to life under her hand.

“I should have spared you that,” he breathed.

“ _No._ ” She bit his mouth. “The choice was mine to make. You all but told me you had secrets. _Leave me my regrets_.” Her voice all but scalded him. “I know how to live with mine.”

“Oh, vhenan.” He rolled his hips into her hand. “You deserved better than this.”

“Yes.” She bit his throat. “I did.” Her magic washed over them both; her clothes fell away beside her. “Say good-bye to me, Solas. You couldn’t even give me that.”

“As you will,” he whispered. “Once we could have done this for a century –”

“Someone thinks highly of himself.”

Despite it all, he laughed into her mouth. “With a century you could give me time to recover.”

“I would rather fuck you now,” she said, squeezing his cock. “I don’t want that kind of patience.” And with that, she sunk down on to him. She wasn’t ready, and cried out; so did he, his fingers curling into fists. His knuckles scraped along the stone, leaving smears of blood. He buried his face in her hair.

“I know,” he whispered against her skin. “I know.”

“I wanted all I could know of Arlathan,” she whispered, rolling her hips down against him. Her fingernails dug into his hip; her voice was ragged, her jaw set. “I – ah! – I still do. But I never want it back. I wouldn’t trade – ah!” He had shifted his hips, rising up to meet her. “Not for anything, damn you.”

He rested his head against her shoulder and wept, letting her ride him.  She pressed her fingers in between her legs and brought herself to a sobbing, savage climax; he cried out and came as she clenched around him, his wrists straining at his chains. They slumped together there, sweat cooling in between them, his cock going soft inside her.

“Vhenan,” he said. “Ar vhenada –” _You are all my heart._

“Hush,” she said, kissing his mouth. “Hush.” Her hand crept up to cover one of his, twining their fingers together. The chains clinked.

“I’m sorry,” he whispered.

“I know.” Slowly, she rose off him, breath catching as she did. Whiteness dripped thickly down her thighs. She reached for her scarf, cleaned herself without looking at him.  Her clothes were in a heap, bespelled aside; she pulled them back on, fastening her boots.

“Will you execute me in the morning?” he asked her. His voice was steady now.

“I don’t know yet,” she said, looking back at him from the door. Her shadow stretched across him. “I don’t think I want to be that merciful.” 

He shivered; the sound of the chains filled the cell. “You are cruel,” he whispered.

“I am. So were you.” She pulled the cell door shut, metal scraping on the ground. Her footsteps echoed down the hall.


End file.
